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New York, 6:24 PM
Sun Dec 20
20 posts in the last 24 hours
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12/12/09
something REALLY bothers me about a book in which the rape victim becomes, essentially, a rapist. Why the fuck did Sebold put a scene in her book where she possesses another girl's body just to have sex with it?
12/12/09
I wasn't a particular fan of the book in the first place, though. I know it was meant to feel dreamy, but it also felt disjointed and chaotic. I just didn't like it very much.
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12/12/09
Sorry, that's how the book read to me, and parts of it moved me....the clip I took from Newsweek adds something about "murdered girls" as free spirits as well. Yes, that was in the book--other victims of Harvey of various ages and histories. At one point the women pause and come together, united in grief over the lives and people they'd be taken from. Maybe it's hokey--THAT moved me, but I imagine things that are earnest, slightly sappy, but overall moving in print may come off as full-on sappy in a book.
As for the movie's corny teenage girl's heaven...(from Amazon, with a quote I remember from the book itself:) "Susie's resembles the athletic fields and landscape of a suburban high school: a heaven of her "simplest dreams," where "there were no teachers.... We never had to go inside except for art class.... The boys did not pinch our backsides or tell us we smelled; our textbooks were Seventeen and Glamour and Vogue."'
It sounds like Jackson tried to be loyal to the story, and either he was tone-deaf, or the book itself was just too melodramatic and treacly to work well onscreen.
(Spoilers for book ending below!)
I imagine the ending of the book would rub a lot of people the wrong way too. When I read the book at 12, it struck me as a little dumb...as I got older, and after reading "Lucky," I appreciated the ending more.
There is sex experienced through rape, and then sex as it should be--intimate and pleasurable. Corny supernaturalism aside....I can understand why Sebold would want to end with her heroine "growing up" and experiencing sex as one of the things that makes life pleasurable, instead of as a terrifying, fatal debasement.
I can also imagine that scene losing it's emotional potency very easily when translated on film.
12/11/09
However much they say that this book can't be filmed, a friend of mine wrote this hauntingly beautiful musical adaptation of it that really captured the essence of the book (he wrote the musical Vote! which was in this year's NYC Fringe festival, for any of you New Yorkers). Granted, I only got to see the first act in the Lab showing we did of it, but it still hit those universal notes of loss, innocence, love, pain, and the journey to come to grips with the past that made the book the literary hit that it was. I thought that Jackson could do this, too, but I guess not. I would have liked to see Mira Nair's adaptation of the work. I loved how she approached abuse in Monsoon Wedding, and her use of color seems like it would illicit the dream-like quality of the book.
12/11/09
Film fail.
12/12/09
And I'm not sure it's effective to quote an unbelievably tired meme while you're talking about things not being childish. Seriously, that crap is bannable on every site I go to - why does it persist here?
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12/12/09
The morality isn't actually that black/white, unless you're not paying attention. There's no magical horse. And Ents aren't trees. If all you see in that is something "juvenile" then that's you. And it's not "male driven" the way, say, Die Hard is. For a film reviewer to be that obtuse is just silly.
I don't know...why do you post here if think using a shorthand phrase that's not serious should be bannable?
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12/12/09
I don't see why you get to flatly declare your opinion as fact while raging about critics doing the same thing. Overlong and under-edited isn't the same thing as "complex," and if you honestly think a story about magical warriors and their magical swords is "not male-driven" just because the author threw in a few princesses, I have to wonder why you post here.
Maybe you weren't paying attention to what the critic was actually trying to say there. LOTR is a book written from an unequivocally male point of view, and the movies were designed for and marketed to male audiences. Any female fans were incidental from the studio's perspective, same as pretty much any other blockbuster.
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12/11/09
I don't know if the movie could really capture that feeling, even if I didn't much care for the book.
12/12/09
No offense to your mom; I'm guessing she judged Sebold based on Abigail Salmon, who had an affair afterward (that struck me as a little tawdry and unconvincing too, though)?
Do you need to experience the loss of a loved one to write about grief convincingly?
12/12/09
12/12/09
No, I don't think you necessarily have to experience what you're writing about to be convincing. However, you had better be an excellent writer if you're writing about something as personal and intense as losing a loved one. Writing about rape when you've never experienced it would be really difficult, I would imagine, and no matter how good you are, someone isn't going to find it relatable. I just didn't like her writing style, really, and I couldn't connect with the characters. I didn't finish the book, so I didn't even know about the affair thing. I would probably react differently now that I'm older, but when I read it, it just wasn't for me.
12/11/09
Having said that, I really liked The Lovely Bones. I thought Stanley Tucci was really creepy and the tension was nicely done. Some of the"In Between" stuff is a little silly, but it moves quickly and it is beautifully flimed. For what it's worth, I'd say give it a shot.
12/12/09
(Then again, I am a sucker for animal movies and am prone to vertigo.)
12/12/09
Maybe I'll swipe my husbands DVD and skip ahead.
12/12/09
Skip to the point where they get to the Empire State building, and I assure you, you'll appreciate it. Absolutely jaw-dropping visuals, and on a par with Old Yeller for a tearjerking animal movie.
Wait, you're not the commenter who slept through it. Still good advice.
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12/11/09
I was kind of sad to hear that they toned down the book's content. The rape scene is difficult to read, but I feel like it's kind of necessary to understand the absolute horror that her family is going through.
BOOK SPOILER: Also, what is the mother character going to do without the affair? I felt like that was an important storyline, the different ways the family reacted to Susie's death. Dad becomes obsessive, Lindsay becomes incredibly strong, Mom has the affair to numb herself. Plus, I really like the character of Len and I excited when I heard he was being played by Michael "Christufuh" Imperioli. :(
12/11/09
I am so dissappointed to hear such bad reviews. That book touched me so much when I read it and I was only 13. Arguably too young to fully understand it...
12/12/09
And same here. It seemed way cheesier when I read it earlier this year though.
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12/11/09
If you want to see a movie that handles these topics with a lot less glossiness and oodles of dark heart I can't recommend it enough.
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Did Peter Jackson feel that he needed a challenge?
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Brilliant!
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I'm not sure why people love it so, but if it's the young female protagonist as a rape or violence victim/survivor, I can think of many better books.
12/11/09
On the other hands, i would agree that her newest book (______ Moon) was trying too hard.
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12/11/09
I haven't seen the movie, but do these reviews mean anything? I tend to find no correlation between the reviews of a movie and my actual enjoyment of it.
12/11/09